So good.  SO GOOD.

Regarding audio and such.  We switched to a new audio system literally a week before the beta (it was supposed to be finished a month previously but it took longer than expected). So most of the audio isn't in yet.

Asteroids are not going to cause damage going forward.

Agreed about the excessively wiggling.  What was supposed to be subtle turned into "Hey look what we can do!". We're toning it down.

One expects that the combat map would have limits on its area, but the wraparound allows the map to feel like there's no 'barrier' per se. Sure, you can never get further away from an enemy ship than the wraparound allows, but that's the only real limit - you never get the feeling of being cornered against an artificial barrier (or slamming into one) that the current fleet battles map presents. Which, as people have stated, gives the advantage to the slower bruisers. Attempting to fight them with the faster ships feels less like the hit-and-run battle of past Star Control games and more like being in a cage fight with a tiger. Particularly when that barrier starts contracting.

While I'm here, I'd also agree with the OP that a lot of weapons just don't feel all that impactful and different. Some do, some feel like they're just retextures of each other (what is the difference between Tywom Bolt and Scout Shot, for instance?). Now, this in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing: Star Control 2 certainly had plenty of weapons that were very similar to one another, and the ships that had those were generally distinguished from each other by their secondary weapons and by other parameters. There is, from what I've seen, enough to indicate that similar rules apply to SC:O ships thus far, so this could simply be a case of "haven't had enough experience to properly judge", but it does feel as if we're seeing the same general concepts being repeated as opposed to things that are truly unique.

I had a suspicion that might have been the motivation. However, the current approach feels totally artificial and creates the situation where the slower beat ships can corner the faster ones up against the barrier, and even without the pilot of the bigger ship deliberately pushing the smaller ship up against the wall, it's all too easy for pilots of faster ships to miscalculate where the wall is and fly into it without warning because of how the camera operates, as long as the slower ship is on the inside.

If you need a stalemate breaker to prevent those indefinite keep-away scenarios, just make it, well, a stalemate detector. If a certain amount of time passes without damage or permanent status effects (such as VUX limpets) being inflicted by either side, the game decides which side is likely playing keep-away (probably most likely to be decided by maximum speed, but special abilities that involve movement might also be considered) and considers that ship to have warped away and forfeited.

(Wrap-around screens are not a barrier in this respect: a wrap-around does not prevent keep-away scenarios except in situations where the slower ship has the ability to strike a target anywhere within the combat area, and generally the attacks that do provide that capability are slow enough themselves that they can be dodged anyway.)

The current artificial barrier is, I think, a cure that is much worse than the disease.

(I asked for clarification in another thread, but didn't get a response. Don't know if that's because my post wasn't seen or whether it's because it's something they don't want to talk about.)

While i agree with everyone else that there should be no barriers, if the maps do indeed get bigger and it works well, and if it represents the star system that you will be in, i might give it a try. But it would have to work really well to feel natural like in SC2

The wrap around map of SC2 is a type of barrier, and the last thing it feels like when you teleport from one side to the other is "natural".  It does feel as though you have more freedom, but it also feels strange and doesn't work anywhere near as well as a barrier/wall/arena.

You have to do something to make it work as a game, an open map with no containment doesn't work for a lot of different reasons.

Yes, it does feel more free even though it really isn't.  It is still an "end of the line" for the faster ship, in a way, but can still be "gamed" to  bad effect.  "Dancing on the edge of the neutral zone", in Star Trek terms.  It works, just not as well as an arena.

In open space speed rules, and even a slight speed advantage means that ship has complete control over the situation.  Exchanges of fire take place only when and where the faster ship chooses.  Since the only objective in a 1v1 duel is to win the fight, the faster ship will stay at range and only briefly enter the edge of its range to shoot.  If it both faster with a longer range weapon than the slower ship, you will never even get to shoot back at it.  We call this the "Klingon Sabre Dance", and on an open map it is a "game killing" tactic that makes it no fun for the slower ship which has almost no chance of winning.  This is just a single example of the issue, "griefing" is another.  If I am in a faster ship and just want to annoy you, there won't even be a fight.  I can just stay away from you until you get frustrated and leave the game... just to be a jerk.

While full 3D freedom was never really going to be possible in a game like Star Control, the wraparound, to me, has always felt like it's simply a crude representation of the battle-space being a sphere rather than a square. The idea is that it's assumed that a ship isn't going to simply try to run away (in the full game, this is represented by the warp-out mechanic), so a ship that goes full-pelt in one direction is actually looking to perform a loop to come around from the other side. It's an abstraction, but far more believable than battles occurring in a sphere of bad that for some reason starts contracting if a matchup goes too long, but returns to its original internal diameter once a ship is destroyed and a new one warps in (through that sphere of nasty) to replace it. It's also more fun - at least to me - than being damaged or destroyed by a barrier that you didn't see until you ran into it because you went too far in one direction.

Problem is that the crafting system does allow players to put a long-range weapon on a fast ship and break this balance. Which is part of the reason why I'm inclined to agree with Ur-Quanian that trying to make build-wars a thing in competitive multiplayer was probably a bad idea.

 When it comes to the keep-away-to-troll scenario: I've already presented another way of handling this. Give the game a means of recognising which player is controlling the terms of the engagement, and award the victory to the other player if enough time passes without damage or permanent status effects being inflicted by either side.

One of the advantages of the barrier is exactly what you were pointing out, any other method limits ship design by the needs of the map.  The "tournament barrier" allows for the widest range of ship designs to function within it.

There is no truly great answer to this problem that anyone has ever come up with.  But you don't want "realism".  Realism is the faster ship being in complete control of the situation.  Realism is most weapons facing aft, or ships that fly backwards all of the time.  Realism is definitely not what gamers are expecting in a space ship game.

Gamers want space ships to fly like airplanes, and that has to be forced because it is not natural.

Ugh, quoted when I meant to edit. Is there a delete option?

EDIT Well, since this double-post is here anyway, let's try to make it somewhat constructive:

So, I've been thinking on what conditions COULD create something like what is presented in the current "cage match" battle arena. The requirements for something that could be abstracted into that arena are, I think, the following:

1) A roughly spherical area which cannot be crossed in realspace without taking damage. (This area may be an ovoid that is approximated into a circle on the 2D map, or it may be circular or ovoid in one two-dimensional plane and shaped differently in others, with the assumption that ships mostly prefer to remain in the two-dimensional plane where the area is roughly circular.) 

2) A gravitational body inside the sphere.

3) A 'safe zone' within the sphere.

The one and only naturally-occurring situation I've been able to come up with so far that could vaguely approach anything like this is when a solar flare or other intense source of charged particles hits a magnetosphere strong enough to keep most of those charged particles out: this might create a situation where the inside of the magnetopause presents a refuge while attempting to leave exposes a ship to damaging plasma and radiation. I think this is still a reach for a number of reasons (you should need a pretty serious solar flare to present a real threat to a military-rated starship, and such structures usually have a long 'tail' on the far side of the magnetic body) but it could present a more realistic scenario than a magic ring of asteroids.

I still think, though, that the 'cage match' style play is spoiling the game for many in the name of stopping a few douchebags, and I certainly hope to never see it in the story mode without a good explanation as to why.

I feel that the ring / screen wrap debate will be with us for a long time...
I trust the developer to find a balance.

I would like to point out other issues:
1. I just got blown out by a Scyrve ship that fired through a planet I was hiding behind (not nice...)
2. The Scryve weapon also hurts you when you are near it and not on it ( which I find annoying)
3. It is not comfortable for me to use a keyboard and a mouse to play. I would like to play with the keyboard alone
4. I fined it hard to aim.
    In SC1 & SC2 we only had 3 diagonal positions in each quarter (0, 22.5, 45, 67.5 & 90 degrees) here we have many.
    So, when we are zoomed out and I need to rotate and fire, it is harder to see where your ship is pointing (maybe I am just getting old...)
5. The ships seem balanced --> I liked the fact that every ship in SC2 had at least one ship it could never beat.
    You needed to know exactly when to use it or else you would lose the match.
    Here any ship can fight any ship.
6. Camera doesn't give you enough margins --> I keep hitting those damn asteroids

Hope this helps!

20th-century warships and fighter aircraft have almost invariably had more of their offensive armament facing forward than backwards. The invention of the synchronisation gear that allowed a machine gun to be fired forward through the propeller threatened to give Germany air supremacy in World War 1 until the Allies figured out their own methods of equipping fighters with forward-firing machine-guns, and experiments since with fighters firing their main armament in other directions, such as the British Defiant in WW2, were all failures. (The Germans did have success with upwards-firing Schrage Musik installations, but this was a supplement to the forward-firing armament, not the primary weapon.) Warships generally had the greatest firepower in broadsides due to practical limits imposed on hull design, but designers still try to pack the majority of the primary armament to also be able to fire forward if they can. Even tanks are generally designed to fight an enemy in the direction of their primary movement (which is what I would define as 'forward' for armoured vehicles that are capable of reversing): exceptions, such as the Archer, are also imposed by technical limitations, and for the Archer it was highly impractical to be firing its main gun and moving simultaneously (the gun would recoil into the driver's space...).

I really don't see considerations for space combat overriding the advantages of having your weapons facing in your primary direction of travel. In fact, if anything, they'd be stronger: in terrestrial combat, velocities are limited by various drag factors that are largely proportional to the velocity relative to the common reference frame of Earth. In space, this isn't the case. Any weapon fired by either ship will have the velocity of the firing ship in addition to the velocity it would have when fired from a stationary ship: in practice, this means that firing backwards offers no advantage in effective range or time to target over firing forwards to compensate for the practical complications of not being able to shoot at a target you're flying at. One possible advantage to firing backward at a pursuing opponent rather than firing forward at a pursued opponent is that it might complicate the pursuer's ability to engage in evasive action without breaking off the chase, but when ships are powered by reaction mass thrusters of some description (as seems to be the case in Star Control) this may be counterbalanced by the fact that those thrusters are probably more difficult to 'harden' against enemy fire.

So, history (particularly aeronautical history, which is what space combat physics are likely to be closest to) has shown that forward-facing armaments are superior, and if anything the physics of space combat appear to reinforce this. (Caveat: In situations where engines are relatively weak compared to gravity and ships mostly operate by orbital mechanics, pointing a ship directly towards an enemy ship might not be the best way of getting closer to it, and in these circumstances ships would probably want weapons able to cover as many directions at once rather than focusing forward. However, this does not appear to be the case in the majority of any Star Control battle map)

Now, you may be thinking in terms of Star Control physics, where projectiles do not necessarily gain the velocity of the firer (they do in some cases, such as the Kohr-Ah FRIED, but there are also some very clear cases where they do not such as the Mycon plasmoids). Even here, though, game experience does not seem to hold to your hypothesis: the Spathi Eluder, while a good ship, is not unbeatable, despite having high speed and agility, above-average durability, and a good rear-firing weapon. In fact, the statistics of the Eluder ameliorate some of the disadvantages coming from having their primary weapon: the Eluder can turn quickly allowing it to move into firing position, turn around to point its rear at the enemy, and commence engaging in the Spathi's second-favourite tactic (their favourite, of course, being not fighting in the first place). Ships with slower turn rates would not be able to pull this off as efficiently.

Melee is a bit 'gameified' in the sense that there would be no advantage to the player in warping out over going out in a blaze of glory - the ship is gone for the rest of the map regardless. Unless one player decides to troll the other by dragging out the match, this works: the player with an unwinnable matchup just does what damage they can before bringing up another ship. My proposal, however, would allow for such trolling to be punished (by assuming that a ship that does nothing but run away will eventually just warp-out) without throwing out the baby with the bathwater by turning the simulated freedom of the wraparound map into an unrealistic cage-match. (Having an objective - most likely the planet - would also serve to limit keep-away behaviour.)

Faster ships generally having shorter-range weapons, to me, is something that makes sense from a realism perspective as well as a gameplay sense. Longer-range weapons are likely to be bigger. Bigger weapons require more space to be mounted on a ship, which in turn requires bigger ships. Bigger ships are likely to be slower.

Furthermore, the SC2 model still allows for long-range weapons on faster ships, since it also has a number of slower ships that are able to protect themselves against being plinked at by such weapons, such as point-defence systems, shields, and other defences, while often still having a means of shooting back. While ships that are slow and have short-range weapons, such as the Avatar and Intruder, have means of reducing the mobility of the enemy ship.
 

I'd agree that, from a believability perspective, an artificial energy field would make more sense than an unnatural asteroid field, but at the bottom line, to me it's less enjoyable than the original formula. And from what I've seen of other people's feedback, that appears to be the majority opinion: there are a few people praising the restricted map, but a lot more saying that they prefer the original wraparound style.

Given that SC2 appears to have managed a high degree of variation between ships despite having the wraparound map that you claim limits ship design, it appears that the only real advantage to the cage-match play is to limit trolling behaviour - and I think there are ways to do that which doesn't punish everybody for the sake of the odd troll.